TEPCO starts moving highly radioactive water to storage facility+

TOKYO, April 19 Kyodo -
The operator of the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant on Tuesday started a nearly one-month mission to move highly radioactive water from the No. 2 reactor turbine building to another facility at the site as part of efforts to enable engineers to engage in work to restore key cooling functions of the troubled reactors.
Tokyo Electric Power Co. plans to transfer about 10,000 tons of the deadly water found in and around the building, which has an extremely high level of radiation exceeding 1,000 millisieverts per hour, and create by June a system that would clean up the stored water to some extent.
The move marks some progress toward settling the country's worst nuclear crisis triggered after the March 11 killer earthquake and tsunami, but it is uncertain whether Tokyo Electric can succeed in creating a system that can efficiently process massive amounts of polluted water and eventually use some of it to cool reactors.
Pumping out the highly contaminated water is also important to prevent it leaking into the Pacific Ocean, given that an underground tunnel-like trench connected to the No. 2 reactor turbine building is located close to the sea and is also filled up with polluted water.
Workers have been troubled by vast pools of water found at the six-reactor nuclear complex, now estimated to total some 70,000 tons. The water is believed to be a side effect of the stopgap measure of injecting water into many of the plant's reactors and spent nuclear fuel pools to prevent them from overheating.
With water injection continuing, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano told a press conference Tuesday morning that a total meltdown is unlikely if the reactors are kept cool ''to a certain extent'' as seen now.
Of some 70,000 tons of contaminated water, about 25,000 tons of highly toxic water is flooding the basement of the No. 2 turbine building and the trench connected to it.
The utility firm known as TEPCO has decided to transfer only 10,000 tons of it to a nuclear waste disposal facility because filling up the facility with the liquid may lead radioactive substances to seep into the groundwater, according to the government's nuclear regulatory agency.
Careful preparations have been made prior to the mission of moving the dangerous water to the waste disposal facility, with workers checking the 800-meter-long hoses for leaks and repairing cracks in the building.
Under the current plan, the work is expected to continue for about 26 days, TEPCO officials said.
The water in and around the No. 2 reactor turbine building is believed to contain higher concentrations of radioactive substances than other contaminated water found at the site, and is believed to originate from the No. 2 reactor's core, where fuel rods have partially melted.
In another sign that the No. 2 unit poses the most problems, a pair of remote-controlled robots failed to carry out sufficient measurements of the radiation level inside the building housing the No. 2 reactor because the high humidity clouded the lenses of the robots' camera lenses, the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said.
The only data taken Monday was at an area near the door of the building, which was 4.1 millisieverts per hour. The radiation levels detected inside the Nos. 1 and 3 reactor buildings were between 10 and 57 millisieverts per hour, according to data taken Sunday.
The agency's spokesman Hidehiko Nishiyama told a press conference in the afternoon that the agency is not sure whether the reading at the No. 2 building was a ''representative figure'' of the area, and that TEPCO is considering whether to take measures to reduce the humidity found to be between 94 and 99 percent.
The high humidity can be attributed to the fact that the building is not damaged like Nos. 1 and 3 reactor buildings, which have suffered hydrogen explosions, Nishiyama said.
The robots' lenses became clouded soon after they entered the No. 2 reactor building and the robots were called back because the utility did not want them to get lost, TEPCO officials said.
The investigation is intended to check whether workers could safely engage in restoration work inside the reactor buildings and was conducted by robots provided by U.S. company iRobot Corp.
Other foreign companies have also offered help to Japan. Anne Lauvergeon, the chief of French nuclear-engineering firm Areva SA, said in Tokyo on Tuesday that her company plans to start the operation of a water treatment facility by the end of May, which would help TEPCO deal with the massive amounts of polluted water.
The company said it is proposing installing a facility that has a capacity to clean up 50 tons of contaminated water in one hour.